Newsletter No. 25
AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2004
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Take Back Your Time Day Campaign grows in the U.S.A. The Take Back Your Time Day campaign is gaining momentum in the USA. Its first Take Back Your Time Day, 24 October last year, staged events in a number of centres throughout the US. The date marked the nine weeks difference in annual hours worked by Americans and Europeans. The campaign now has a Board of Directors & an Advisory Board. In 2004, an election year, it is asking all political parties to consider a 4-point program as a basis for new laws, namely: * make election day a holiday; * enact some form of paid family and medical leave; * require a minimum 3-week paid holiday for all Americans; * Cap mandatory overtime. After its 2003 Take Back Your Time Day, campaign leaders decided to shift future emphasis from overwork to the personal and cultural side of time famine: ‘over-scheduling and the general time urgency stimulated by our over-frenzied society.’ The organization is fashioning a new vision statement to reflect this broader approach. The composition of its Boards indicates both the strengths and weaknesses of the Take Back Your Time Day campaign at this stage. Cornell University’s Centre for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy sponsors the project. Its directors come largely from academia and think tanks. This places considerable resources in the hands of the campaign, both intellectual and logistical. Most directors have in fact published on various aspects relating to work-time-life issues. However, there are no representatives from the US labour movement among the Directors, and only minor representation on the advisory board. This has at least two major implications: * in building a broad alliance the campaign risks talking in ‘warm and fuzzy’ universalities, so no group is alienated by its objectives. But like peace, which is generally good, but not for the arms trade, so too, a sustainable society and lifestyle is also good - except for those whose wealth and power is based on exploitation of work time. * To create, not just a desire, but a capacity to enforce a general change in work-time culture, it must ultimately be settled in the workplace, in industry, by the workforce. Labour must successfully challenge capital on the issue and gain legislative and industrial breakthroughs, otherwise shorter hours, like job security, will remain an option for the few. It is critical for Take Back Your Time Day to ally its intellectual and moral force to the motor of the labour movement: so the campaign will transform itself, as it fully confronts labour’s circumstances in the United States and assists its cause. A secondary, nevertheless vital alliance is with schools of economics and labour relations that can counter prevailing paradigms to justify suppression of labor rights in the name of market ‘laws’. |